Notes on Nowhere: Feminism, Utopian Logic, and Social Transformation

1. Locational Hazards: The Utopian Impulse and the Logic of Social Transformation

1 Locational Hazards: The Utopian Impulse and the Logic of Social Transformation In Critique, Norm, and Utopia, Seyla Benhabib identifies the anticipatory /utopian pole within theories of social transformation as that which gives us our normative grounding and sense of a moral imperative , that which allows us to make qualitative judgments and to construct an orientation toward the good. In this way, Benhabib associates the Utopian impulse with what Ernst Bloch calls our "principle of hope"—our ability and desire to imagine something other and better than our existing conditions. At the same time, however, the Utopian impulse is characterized by a set of conservative logics and gestures that are increasingly seen as incompatible with positive social transformation. These "utopian logics" manifest themselves in the following gestures: an emphasis on unity, harmony, and selfconsistency ; the institution of a strict boundary between authentic and inauthentic; a preoccupation with removing itself from implication in dystopian structures and logic; and the projection of internal contradiction and contamination onto a devalued space. U-topia literally means "nowhere"—an "unplace" whose nature is to be inaccessible to the "real," dystopian world (Marin 1984: 88)—and the defining goal of Utopia is to establish itself as a harmonious and stable space that exists as the self-contained "elsewhere" of existing conditions . The proper name of Utopia thus stands as a figure for the self-containment and inaccessibility that protects the image of the ideal society from being contaminated by the historical conditions of its production: Utopia at once names itself and creates the strict 1 Locational Hazards boundaries between itself and other social spaces that guarantee its existence as a separate and unique (state of) being. In creating itself as the absolute "elsewhere" of its historical moment, Utopia thus detaches itself from the process of social transformation and effaces its relation to the process of history. The requirement that Utopia exist as a harmonious and unified space funds the strict boundaries between authentic (that which is internal to Utopia) and inauthentic (that which is external to Utopia).This emphasis on authenticity has as one of its consequences the translation of internal contradiction into contamination, which is then projected onto external and subsequently devalued spaces. Utopia thus founds itself on a circular and self-fulfilling relation to its fear of contamination: it projects internal contradiction onto a subsequently devalued place, and when this contradiction confronts it as external contamination, Utopia reinforces the boundaries that sustain an image of itself as separate and self-contained. Originally, Marxism rejected Utopian logic primarily because of its idealist disconnection from material conditions; more recently, the critique of Utopia has progressed to a more fundamental questioning of the underlying totalizing gestures that fund Utopian logic. Contemporary feminist and postmodern critics, for example, have connected the construction of an undifferentiated, harmonious community to an ideology of "wholeness and identification" that sacrifices individual difference to a vision of hermetic social unity.1 In particular, critics attack the way Utopian concepts such as unity and transcendence have supported an oppressive ideology of the individual subject that creates hierarchies, effaces difference, and privileges some forms of subjectivity to the exclusion of others. The alternative , critics argue, is to view the subject as embedded in existing conditions , and to see contradiction and difference as something internal to the subject. Against the notion of a transcendent subject, these strains of contemporary theory present us with a radically embodied subject—one whose identity is historically grounded, contingent, and produced by culture rather than existing outside of it. The progression described here might be seen as a movement away from the anticipatory/utopian pole and into what Benhabib calls the critical/diagnostic pole—the pole that concentrates on dis2 Locational Hazards rupting the illusion of unity in subject and society. In fact, however, these two poles already imply one another: Utopia implicitly critiques existing conditions by explicitly thematizing a set of wishes and hopes for an alternative society; critique implicitly draws upon the Utopian impulse to establish the "outside" of existing conditions upon which our notion of critical distance rests.The extent to which these poles are interconnected is evident in the way that the "loss" of the Utopian pole in critical theory has been attended by an increasing sense of our eroding ability to effectively critique existing conditions . The more the Utopian impulse in general and the subject in particular is understood to be embedded and implicated...